Enduring cognate facilitation: evidence for form-based transfer in bilingual word recognition

Cognates are words that share meaning across languages alongside all or most of their orthography. They are generally processed faster than control words, an effect known as cognate facilitation. The current study set out to investigate whether long-term cognate facilitation in a multi-day practice paradigm is driven by shared mental representations or graded cross-linguistic similarity effects. Dutch-English participants completed a visual lexical decision paradigm over five consecutive days, with testing on the first and fifth day in one language (L1 or L2) and practice on the intervening days in the other language. Target words included identical and non-identical cognates, non-cognate translation equivalents, controls, and non-words. While results showed a robust procedural practice effect across all word types, both identical and non-identical cognates exhibited a significantly larger cross-linguistic performance transfer than translation equivalents and control words. Crucially, the transfer effects for identical and non-identical cognates did not statistically diverge, and no additional transfer was observed for purely semantic translation equivalents. These patterns suggest that shared semantic representations alone cannot account for enduring cognate facilitation. Rather than proving isolated shared structural representations, the findings demonstrate that cross-linguistic transfer in visual word recognition is heavily modulated by graded form-based similarity, reflecting tightly coupled orthographic and phonological processing pathways.